Three
Searching for RealityI dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?
Have you ever had a dream so vivid and so real that upon waking you felt startled, like you had opened your eyes up into a new world? A dream so real that you were no longer sure whether the world you just left, or the world you had woken into, was the real one?
I used to have these horribly vivid dreams. Horrible because they were usually about the death of my mother and father. Each was different. In one I had left a candle on in my room and they burned alive in our house, while I stood outside and watched. In another aliens invaded our home and beamed them away in their UFO’s. Some were rather far fetched and were easy to detect that they were dreams. The worst were the ones that were very close to the truth. In these I would arrive home to a dark house with my sister looking at me accusingly whispering that our parents were dead, over and over again, her voice getting louder and louder until I finally pulled myself from the dream, often sweating and screaming.
I was plagued by these horrible nightmares for years, that was until I met Jong Suk. When we first began dating I was terrified of telling him about my parents and the horrible guilt that had burdened me for the past 6 years. I thought that I could hide the fact that I would often wake up in a cold sweat from him until I could gather the courage to finally tell him the truth. It was only a few months after we started dating that I found I was not, and for the rest of our days together would not, be able to keep secrets from Jong Suk for too long.
That was our 100 day anniversary, and while he was walking me back to my tiny apartment from the restaurant that we had eaten at the day we met, it began to rain. This was not just a drizzle but a downpour that made me think that a typhoon was on its way. Of course we had both forgotten umbrellas so we sprinted hand-in-hand back to my apartment. By the time we got there we were both shivering and soaked to the bone. Not wanting Jong Suk to get sick I invited him in to dry his clothes, take a shower and wait until the rain died down.
He was a little skeptical about the clothes part, joking that unless I had a secret boyfriend who left his clothes at my apartment somewhere, he would have to sit on my living room floor while his clothes dried. I laughed along with him but went to the back of my closet and found the pair of men’s clothes I had saved and tossed it to him anyway. He raised his eyebrows, silently questioning why I had mens clothes in my house, but I just shrugged saying that someone I had known long ago had left them at my place. He just looked at me and accepted it, leaning down to kiss my cheek before walking off to the bathroom to take a shower.
I thought I had prepared myself when I gave Jong Suk those clothes, his clothes, and that I would be able to keep it together and show Jong Suk that they were just some clothes left behind by someone long ago. But as Jong Suk walked out of the bathroom, rubbing his damp hair with a towel, I choked up and tears began to rise in my eyes. My boyfriend was walking out to see me, wearing the clothes of my dead father. Jong Suk was a lot taller than my father had been, so the clothes were a bit small on him. But just seeing my father’s favorite t-shirt on him brought a flood of emotions and I turned away from him, quickly wiping the tears from my eyes. He thanked me for the clothes and I just smiled at him.
We stayed up for a while, waiting to see if the rain would ever die down but it just seemed to be getting worse. I suggested that he should stay for the night since the next day was Saturday and we didn’t have any plans anyway. Ever the gentlemen, Jong Suk offered to sleep out on blankets in the living room. So after I helped him set up his bed in the living room I wished him a goodnight and walked to my small bedroom and closed the door behind me.
As I laid down to sleep, lightning now flashing outside of my window, I prayed that tonight I could sleep soundly without a having a nightmare. But no matter how much I wished for it, I knew I could not escape the terror of the night, and as I slipped further into sleep, the nightmare began.
In this nightmare my father was standing before me, shirtless and covered in scratches. He opens his mouth, “How could you replace me so easily?” I try to tell him he’s wrong but my voice comes out as a strangled gurgle.
“You betrayed me. You never loved me. I gave you everything and this is what I get?” He accuses in a voice that sounds almost dead compared to the lively, fun voice I remember him having. I begin to sob but he continues his voice twisting to become almost demon-like.
“You did this to me! You killed me!”
With a final roar he leaps for me, and I let out a strangled scream, pulling myself out of the dream, shaking and sweating. I hear loud footsteps in the living room and Jong Suk burst into my room panting, his hair and clothes a mess. He just stands there panting and trying to make out my shape in the darkness. He reaches out to flip on the light switch but I stop him. How could I let him turn on the light and see that I was crying?
“Miso? Are you okay?” Jong Suk pants out. “Yeah, I’m good.” I shakily reply.
“Are you sure? You don’t sound okay..” I hesitate and try to hide a sniffle. “Yeah I’m sure it was just a bad dream."
“A bad dream? Well do you want to talk about it?” Jong Suk asks kindly. I wave my hand in a dismissive sort of way. “No I’m fine it’s nothing.. I’ll see you in the morning. Sorry I woke you.” I apologize without once looking in his direction.
Despite my attempts to get rid of Jong Suk and deal with the nightmares as I always do, he persists and I hear him walk over to my bed and tentatively sit down.
“Miso please look at me.” He pleads. With one hand, he gently reaches out and cups my chin and turns it towards his own face. When I finally gain the courage to look into his eyes I see the amount of worry for me in them. Ashamed of how I made him worry so much I look down and away from his eyes. Instead my eyes land on his shirt, my father’s shirt and the nightmare comes rushing back to me. I begin to feel the onsets of a panic attack, my heart racing and my breath coming out in pants.
“Miso? Miso?! What’s wrong?” He yells. I am unable to reply and am reduced to grasping the front of his shirt so tightly I can feel the individual fibers under my fingers. Through the panic I feel Jong Suk grab my face between his hands and all of a sudden his face is right in front of mine.
“I’m gonna go and call the hospital okay Miso? You just stay here and I will be right back.”
The hospital? No, he can’t. I hate hospitals. So much death.
As he stands up to leave I grab onto his hand so tightly that I see him wince a little. “No.. Please… Don’t… Call…” I manage to wheeze out.
He tries to remove my vice grip from his hand. “Miso I have to. You’re having some kind of attack.” The amount of worry in his voice makes my panic attack escalate.
“Please… Don’t… Leave… Me… Jong… Ah…”
He stares incredulously, but slowly begins to sit down. He pulls me into his chest and just holds me tightly. The constrict of his arms, while at another time may have been too tight, gives me comfort and my heart slowly begins to stop racing.
“I promise Miso. I will never ever leave you.”
I break down and sob into my father’s shirt and explain everything to him, my parent’s deaths, my horrible guilt, my estranged sister. Having kept it back for so long it gushes out like a dam being broken. After I was done I waited for a few minutes in the silence, the only sound in the room the now quiet sounds of our breathing. I close my eyes and wait for him to stand up and leave, finally having seen enough of the crazy freak show that I call a life.
“I love you Miso.” Jong Suk whispers. I open my eyes in surprise. In the 100 days that we have been together he has only said that he loves me once before. I begin to cry again and Jong Suk kisses the tears off of my puffy eyes and wet cheeks.
“I love you so much Miso and it makes my heart hurt to know that you’ve had to live with this guilt for so long. I’m so sorry that I didn’t notice anything was wrong sooner and that you had to live through this all by yourself.” Tears begin to slide down Jong Suk’s own cheeks.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for all those previous nightmares, but I can promise that I will be there for the rest. If you need me to stay up with you till the crack of dawn because you are afraid I will do just that. I will hold you so tightly at night that the boogeyman won’t find even one finger of yours that I can’t protect.” He lifts my chin and stares into my eyes.
“I love you Miso. From now on, you never have to bear this burden alone. I promise that I will never leave you.” He whispers leaning in closely until his face blurs out of sight. His lips are only a few centimeters away from mine, but he leaves the space leaving me with the choice whether to close the gap between us or not. As I lean forward and pull him into a kiss, I am comforted by the simple thought that maybe for just one night in my life I could have a beautiful dream instead of a horrible nightmare.
Every night after I told Jong Suk about my nightmares, he would always call to check up on me right before I went to bed. While I still had nightmares every once in a while, he always insisted that I call him as soon as I had the nightmare so he could calm me down. We often spent our nights apart with our phones connected, lines on speaker, sometimes talking, sometimes not. I spent many nights falling asleep to the sound of Jong Suk’s snores over the phone.
One month after I told Jong Suk about my nightmares he asked me to move in with him. He joked about it saying that his phone bill was getting a bit expensive and he wanted to get a restful night sleep without waking up in the middle of the night to phone calls.
“I’m sorry. If it’s that much of a bother to you I can stop.” I apologized to the ground.
Jong Suk laughed again, showing me that beautiful smile. “It’s not the calls that bother me. It’s the fact that I can’t hear your adorable snore in real life. I want to be able to hold you at night, not just hear you.” He smiled at me rubbing my head gently. My heart beat a million miles a minute at his confession. “Pfft. I don’t snore.” I scoffed. He laughed, “Oh you wanna bet? I have a recording of you sleeping right there on this phone, so let’s see if you really are a snorer or not.” He smiled at me cocking his eyebrows playfully.
From the day that Jong Suk and I moved in together, the nightmares stopped. I finally began to accept my parent’s death, and while I still carried the same guilt, I was learning to channel them into more creative outlets. Jong Suk became a sort of dream catcher for me, while he was there he would block all the bad dreams and let in only the good ones, which mainly involved him anyway. He became the light in my dark, dark night.
My dear dream catcher, my dear Jong-ah. I’m having another nightmare.
In this current nightmare, I search for my dream catcher, my Jong Suk, but I cannot find him. Instead, there is my Mother and Father, the main characters of my old nightmares, and I am surrounded by a team of doctors. They poke me, they prod me, they shine bright lights in my eyes. Finally, after what feels like hours they stop all the tests and a single doctor stands beside my bed and begins to talk.
“Miss Han can you hear me? If you are to tired to talk just nod yes or no to let me know that you can understand me alright?” He begins in a stern, yet kind voice. His voice was so familiar that I tried to place it. I struggled for a little while and then figured it out, the voice from the graveyard. The unfamiliar voice that I had heard after I gave my speech about Jong Suk.
But what is this man to me? I blink slowly and sluggishly nod my head once, my curiosity piked, even in my weakened state. My Mother sighs a little, in relief or something else I’m not sure.
“My name is Dr. Choi and I have been your personal physician for the past 6 years.”
6 years. I shake my head. I don’t understand this.
“Well, this might be hard for you to accept,” he sighs heavily rubbing his hand over his tired face, “but you have been in a coma for the past 6 years."
I just stare at him dumbly, unable to process what he is saying to me.
“6 years ago you were involved in a car accident on your way home from school and sustained massive head injuries. While we were able to save your life, we had to put you into a medically induced coma while we waited for the swelling in your brain to go down. Then when we decided it was safe to lift you from the medically induced coma, you had fallen into a natural coma.” He explained slowly.
“You still had brain function so your parents kept you on life support for the past 6 years hoping that you would eventually wake up. While there would be spikes of brain activity at certain times, you showed no signs of waking. So we tried once last thing that gave us the chance to bring you back.” he looked straight into my eyes, the brown orbs piercing my own.
“We stopped your heart. You were dead for 5 minutes and we managed to bring you back."
Dead?
“Thankfully it worked because after 6 long years you are finally back with us.” He smiled gently down at me and squeezed my arm. A tumult of thought were racing through my mind that I didn’t know what question to ask first. Suddenly a sharp beeping cuts across my thoughts and Dr. Choi’s hand flies from my arm to his belt. He pulls out a pager and looking at the display, he stands and begins to stride out of the room. He turns around to face me, “I’ll see you soon and I’ll bring the doctor from Psychiatry in with me. Until then just rest."
Psychiatry? I’m not crazy am I? If anyone is crazy it’s everyone else.
I look down and away from him, at my own hands for the first time. They are soft and wrinkle free, just like they were when I was young.
How could this be happening? What IS happening?
Dr. Choi speaks to me once again, “Welcome back to the real world Miss Han.” And with that he’s gone. I turn my head away from my hands, away from my parents, away from everything. I close my eyes and begin to feel the tears stream down my cheeks.
Please wake me from this nightmare Jong-ah.
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